Recovering Migrant Histories

with Randa Tawil

hosted by Chris Gratien & Brittany White

| What are the perils and possibilities of writing the histories of everyday people? In this episode, we return to this question with Randa Tawil, as she reflects on the process of research and writing. Tawil previously joined us on the Ottoman History Podcast to talk about the life of Zeinab Ameen, a woman from late Ottoman Lebanon who set out for the United States with her family, only to become separated from them and endure a difficult, circuitous, and ultimately heartbreaking journey that illuminates what it meant from Arab migrants to navigate the many spaces of the mahjar. In this conversation with University of Virginia students, we go behind the scenes to examine how the category of "migrant" can be both problematic and productive in writing about past people. We explore the importance of speculative analysis, and we discuss how history writing functions as an act of recovery with value for our present.

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What are the perils and possibilities of writing the histories of everyday people? In this episode, we return to this question with Randa Tawil, as she reflects on the process of research and writing. Tawil previously joined us on the Ottoman History Podcast to talk about the life of Zeinab Ameen, a woman from late Ottoman Lebanon who set out for the United States with her family, only to become separated from them and endure a difficult, circuitous, and ultimately heartbreaking journey that illuminates what it meant from Arab migrants to navigate the many spaces of the mahjar. In this conversation with University of Virginia students, we go behind the scenes to examine how the category of "migrant" can be both problematic and productive in writing about past people. We explore the importance of speculative analysis, and we discuss how history writing functions as an act of recovery with value for our present.

Contributor Bios

	Randa Tawil is an Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies. Her research interests include migration and mobility, histories of empire, and the production of racialized sexuality. Her current manuscript “Race in Transit: Mobilities Between Greater Syria and the United States” follows new mobilities of US empire and Syrian migration in the early 20th century, and examines mobility as the site of gendered and racial formations for Syrians on the move. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Open Democracy, and Ms. Muslim. You can follow her current projects at RandaTawil.com.
	Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century.
	Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

Credits

Episode No. 536
Release Date: 21 January 2023
Recording Location: University of Virginia
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Music: A.A. Aalto
Bibliography courtesy of Randa Tawil
Special thanks to the students of HIME 3501 who appear in the podcast: Madeleine Frank, Melanie York, Graham Bucko, Amanda Kopf, Esha Saigal, Kelly Shirer, Tessa Bowman, Frankie Garner, and Carson Becker

Further Listening

	Randa Tawil	478 9/28/20	Zeinab's Odyssey
	Rawan Arar, Andrew Arsan, Reem Bailony, Neda Maghbouleh	436 11/25/19	Narrating Migration
	Ella Fratantuono	331 9/1/17	Migrants in the Late Ottoman Empire
	David Gutman	433 11/14/19	The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America
	Deporting Ottoman Americans	411 5/2/19	Turkino
	Richard Breaux	494 2/23/21	Musical Archives of the Midwest Mahjar

Bibliography

Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Gualtieri, Sarah. Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California. 1 edition. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019.

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Luibheid, Eithne. Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality At The Border. 1 edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Pastor, Camila. The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016.

Tang, Eric. Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto. 1 edition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015.